The racist and transphobic online commentary about Olympic boxers, including Algerian Imane Khelif, and the violence throughout England over the past week are deeply connected. Both are instances of bigots using the internet to spread lies that make our communities less safe. And the people who govern social media spaces are creating the conditions that help hate speech thrive and grow. We are calling on tech leaders at Meta, Alphabet (parent company of Google and YouTube), and X to lead by example, not sink to the lowest bar.
Tell X, Meta, and Alphabet: This cannot go on. All of us deserve to be safe on and off the internet. You can and must use your positions to stop dangerous lies from spreading online.
On July 30th, a day after a horrific triple murder in England, racist instigators started false Islamophobic and xenophobic rumors online about a made-up perpetrator. The disinformation was reshared thousand of times, and catalyzed multiple nights of violence against asylum seekers and Muslim people across the country; further traumatizing a community trying to mourn for three murdered children, mobs of white nationalists threw bricks at a mosque, lit cars on fire, and surrounded a hotel housing asylum seekers.1
The disinformation that led to these attacks was posted by right-wing saboteurs online, boosted by algorithms designed to offer outrageous content for clicks, and was left to spread unchecked by deliberately understaffed moderation teams.2 No one deserves to be terrorized on account of hateful disinformation tearing through our digital spaces.
Enough is enough. We need to tell social media companies to stop allowing hate to spread on their platforms, now. Sign the petition to X, Meta, and Alphabet.
This week, disinformation also put a pall over the 2024 Olympics as right-wing influencers, in a move right out of their reactionary playbooks, spread unfounded rumors to slander Black and brown female boxers. The hateful transphobic tropes used by the right-wing hurt all of us, by making it harder to express gender in whatever way is truest to ourselves, reinforcing racist stereotypes about who is and isn’t sufficiently feminine, and dehumanizing trans people who already face prejudice.3
Sign the petition: Meta, Alphabet, and X must deplatform disinformation.
What if we had an internet that prioritized truth and safety? What if social media companies stopped disinformation that endangered peoples’ lives and attacked them for their identities before it led to violence? We must and will keep fighting for this internet, because our lives depend on its existence.
Petition:
Dear X, Meta, and Alphabet,
We demand an internet where people of all identities are safe. Flagrantly biased disinformation is leading to offline hate and violence. You must staff up your moderation teams, invest in fact checking, and deplatform every instance of racist, prejudicial, and transphobic hate speech.
Your failure to take decisive action is leading to increased hate crimes across the world. Enough is enough.
Signed,
[Kairos supporters]
Sources:
- “Southport stabbings: Far-right disinformation fuels riots across UK,” CNN, Aug. 1, 2024.
- “Reversal of content policies at Alphabet, Meta and X threaten democracy, warn experts,” The Guardian, Dec. 7, 2023.
- “Olympic Boxer Imane Khelif Faces Transphobic Attacks Online” Vulture, Aug. 3, 2024.
